Trash TV: The Equalizer & The Equalizer 2

Yes, I know it says trash TV and this is a movie and not a TV series. But I watched it on Netflix, and new movies are just getting slapped up onto streaming services now. What even is a movie? The film/telvision membrane has dissolved, people! Nothing means anything anymore!

So anyway, I recently found myself with very low amounts of brain juice, due to migraines. I was “low on spoons”, as the kids like to say. I needed something to pass the time, something that would involve absolutely no mental effort or concentration whatsoever.

And that’s how I ended up watching both Equalizer movies back to back.

The Equalizer

Denzel Washington is The Equalizer!

Eventually. At the start of the movie he’s a whimsical hardware store employee named Robert McCall who dispenses sage wisdom and improves the lives of his coworkers and friends by being so gosh-darn nice. But in fact, he’s actually a retired CIA assassin, and in movies CIA assassins have super ninja powers so that means Robert can kill entire rooms full of armed bad guys with his bare hands.

He hasn’t done any equalizing since his wife died, but then a young sex worker with a heart of gold gets abused by her Russian pimp and Robert decides to secure her freedom via murder. Through a series of events that make no sense, this leads to Robert engaging in a one-man war against the Russian mafia’s entire east coast operation; they send a bunch of goons to track him down and kill him, the goons fail spectacularly, then there’s a big fight in the hardware store where Robert works and the movie ends.

I’m not being flippant here. The Equalizer (a phrase which, incidentally, is never actually stated in either movie and which doesn’t really mean anything) is yet another entry in the burgeoning Dad Fantasy genre of action movies where older actors violently murder people to protect surrogate daughter and/or wife figures, but it is the dadliest dad fantasy ever put on film. Robert is ludicrously over-competent, to the point where he is literally never in any danger at all until the very final action scene. He’s always five steps ahead of the villains, he always anticipates every trick they try to pull, he never seems concerned about his ability to come out of any confrontation alive.

As you can probably imagine, this is turn-your-brain-off cinema of the highest order. The movie’s entire purpose is to show Denzel Washington taking down armed assailants with paper clips and oven mitts or whatever, and any time that’s not happening the script just coasts along on auto-pilot. Robert doesn’t really have any character arc at all beyond getting over his very mild reluctance to start equalizing again, and the movie glosses over important character and plot information via dialogue instead of action.

For example, at one point Robert goes to visit an old CIA friend and her husband, and when he gets to their house they all hug and go like “Hey buddy, how’s it going?” as though it’s been maybe a year or two since they’ve seen each other. Then in the following scene we learn that Robert faked his own death to leave his CIA career behind, and his CIA friend and her husband thought he was dead until now. This is the first time either of them have seen him after learning that he’s still alive. These people went to his funeral. It really feels like the bit where he arrives at their house was shot before anyone came up with the fake death idea, and then they just didn’t bother to reshoot it for the finished movie.

At the end of the movie Robert has somehow managed to both stay out of jail and keep his cover story intact, even though multiple civilians see him doing CIA ninjutsu and he blows up an oil tanker. The resulting explosion would have to be the biggest incident of its kind on American soil since 9/11, but apparently no one ever investigates it or even notices that it happened. This is part of a running trend in both movies where the government functionally consists of the CIA and nothing else; no one ever proposes just calling the police to come stop the bad guys (there are some corrupt cops working for the Russians, but after the rest of the Boston PD show up to arrest one of them they’re never seen again, even though you’d think they’d be interested in who managed to apprehend the corrupt detective while single-handedly taking down a huge money laundering operation).

While we’re talking about implausibilities, the entire idea of the super-secret black ops assassin who can take down dozens of assailants is becoming increasingly hard for me to take seriously. I’m sure there are probably people who you could describe with relative accuracy as “CIA assassins” (and the equivalent for other intelligence agencies) but I’d assume they’re people who are really good at using sniper rifles or maybe poisoning people or something. If it was possible to train someone to be able to take on eight armed opponents with nothing but hand to hand combat and consistently win, then every military on Earth would just train all of their soldiers to do that, because why wouldn’t you? Moreover, if you needed to assassinate someone then surely injecting them with poison would be a lot less conspicuous than having your black ops guy shoot and stab his way through all of the target’s bodyguards in a violent rampage.

I’ve been making fun of the movie because, well, it deserves it, but if you’re looking for total switch-your-brain-off action then it’s actually not bad. The fight scenes are creative and completely eschew both Jason Bourne-esque shaky-cam and that Krav Maga-influenced fighting style where two guys hit each other with their elbows for ten minutes, with the result that the action is always clear and comprehensible (you’d think that would be a basic requirement for an action movie, but apparently it isn’t).

Unlike a lot of “gritty” thrillers, the movie doesn’t go for a moody or dark colour palette or tons of neon; instead many scenes are awash in the kinds of bright primary hues you’d normally associate with a Pixar film, and there’s a really interesting use of bright yellow scenery detail throughout that’s quite striking. I’m not sure exactly what effect this was all intended to achieve, but the movie is actually quite pretty to look at as a result.

But other than that, it’s completely stupid. 

The Equalizer 2

Denzel Washington is The Equalizer!

Sometimes. He has a side gig going where he helps people solve their problems via murder, but his day job is being a whimsical Lyft driver (really), who becomes good buddies with his customers and dispenses sage wisdom and advice (no really, I’m not joking either here or in the previous review, he really does that).

But then his CIA friend Susan Plummer is killed while investigating the death of a CIA asset in Belgium and it’s equalizing time!

As I was writing this I had to go to the movie’s Wikipedia page to look something up, and I discovered that both movies are based on a TV series from the 80s, which I was not aware of when I watched them. Also, apparently I was mishearing the characters every single time they said “CIA” because Robert, Susan and all of the other ex-CIA people actually worked for the DIA, which Wikipedia tells me is a real thing. No, I’m not going to go back and change it.

The premise of this one is kind of odd. The first movie ends with Robert setting himself up as basically Batman, offering his help to people in need with his ninja skills, but here he just does that briefly at the start (this involves him going to Turkey, during which he wears a fake beard and pretends to be a Muslim for no apparent reason) and then the rest of the movie is about a personal revenge quest that he presumably would have embarked on even if he hadn’t been equalizing in the meantime. It seems like kind of a wasted oppurtunity.

I think I wouldn’t mind yet another revenge plot so much if the story made more sense. I know I’ve said in the past that I wanted to move away from the Cinema Sins “DING I spotted a minor contradiction I’m so smart” review style, but the villain’s actions in this movie are so nonsensical that I can’t help myself. Let me lay it out for you.

So the bad guys this time around are former C/DIA assassins like Robert who’ve moved onto desk jobs within the agency, but are secretly working as private hitmen on the side. At the start of the movie they kill the Belgian dude and his wife for one of their clients and make it look like a murder-suicide, not realizing that he’s a DIA asset of some kind and that they’ll send someone to do a quick investigation and make sure everything’s on the level. Susan uses her DIA Sherlock Holmes skills to spot various little clues the hitmen left behind, so they take her out via an overly-convoluted scheme where they pay two drug dealers to rob and beat her, and then their leader comes along and finishes her off.

Then they kill the two drug dealers by blowing them up. Then Robert starts sniffing around after Susan’s death, so they decide they have to kill him too. And they also try to kill Susan’s husband.

Supposedly these additional murders are to eliminate “loose ends”, but here’s the thing about tying up loose ends by killing people: every additional murder creates more loose ends, which you then have to deal with by killing more people, like you’re playing Hitman and NPCs keep walking in on you and the ever-expanding pile of bodies you’ve created because you really wanted that waiter outfit. By far the most nonsensical part of this conga line of inexplicable choices is when they decide to go after Susan’s husband, a decision that serves absolutely no purpose beyond making them look more suspicious. Susan’s murder was supposed to look like a random robbery gone wrong, surely if her husband was shot to death in his home days later it would prompt anyone investigating the situation to take another look at it? 

But even before that, wouldn’t the Belgian police notice that people who get too close to the initial assassination keep dying in obviously suspicious ways--like being blown up with a fucking bomb--and put two and two together? Were the bad guys going to take out the entire Brussels police department next? Why did they even kill Susan? Yes, she realized the assassination wasn’t actually a suicide, but she was still a million steps away from “it must have been a cabal of fellow DIA agents secretly moonlighting as contract killers.”

But apart from the nonsensical story, I actually thought this improves on the first Equalizer in a few ways. The movie is much less reliant on random action scenes and violence and more focused on investigation as Robert pieces together the identities of the bad guys instead of just walking into their base and murdering them all. That said, the process of him doing this was clearly not enough to fill the entire movie because we get multiple extraneous sub-plots along the way.

One of these is particularly odd. Robert befriends a teenager named Miles who’s being recruited by a gang, hoping to set him going down a better path, and in one scene Miles is about to be sent on an initiation killing. Robert bursts in having done a non-lethal version of his Equalizer routine and extracts Miles, they argue for a bit, then the scene ends. This is immediately followed by a weird scene where Miles, after an unknown amount of time has passed, shows up to Robert’s apartment acting really jittery and nervously fumbling with his pockets and the waistband of his pants. The scene goes on for a long time like this, with multiple instances of Robert turning his back so that Miles is hovering off-screen, until eventually...Robert gives Miles a Ta-Nehisi Coates book and the movie abruptly cuts to the beginning of an action scene.

Apart from being completely pointless--the only thing it achieves is giving Miles a reason to be in Robert’s apartment later, but that dialogue could have been worked into the preceding scene--this whole sequence reads really strongly like Miles has been sent by his gang friends to kill Robert and is having trouble going through with it. But I’m not sure if that was actually intentional, and if it was then it’s strange that the gang is never brought up again. Very odd.

In conclusion these movies are perfectly watchable trash, 10/10.